Anthropic cracks down on AI game cloning as risk of unauthorised digital copies, reskins grows

AI giant Anthropic has introduced new restrictions which attempt to stop its Claude coding software from recreating existing games, amid generative AI providing the capability to quickly spin up unauthorised digital clones and reskins.

The changes were spotted in Claude Code’s instructions around October 27, with two new sentences telling the software: “Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets”, and “Don’t build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original”.

Anthropic technical staff member Addy Osmani confirmed the changes in a post on X, saying the company had introduced the restrictions because using Claude to infringe intellectual property rights was already against its usage policy.

Board games are vulnerable to AI-generated imitations because their underlying gameplay mechanics generally cannot be protected by copyright – while generative AI also makes it easier to reproduce those systems digitally, and create alternative imagery and text without directly copying the original game’s protected material.

The potential danger to tabletop publishers was highlighted last year when US software development company Sembit used Claude Code to produce a browser-based version of Catan within four minutes – although that rapidly-assembled version suffered from significant bugs and some non-functioning gameplay features.

Unauthorised online versions of board games are not a new phenomenon, with publishers having faced challenges controlling digital recreations of their titles long before AI coding tools became widely available. But generative AI potentially makes such recreations much easier to produce, lowering the technical expertise, time and cost needed to turn an existing tabletop game into a playable digital version.

Colonist.io, which was launched in 2017 as Katan.io before rebranding in 2019, openly markets itself as a free alternative to Catan, closely reproducing the original game’s rules, gameplay and visual layout while using different artwork. The platform reported 60 million games played and 3.6 million active players across 2025.

Colonist.io states clearly on its website that it has no association with Catan, and argues that its game is legal under US law, citing guidance from the US Copyright Office that gameplay methods cannot be protected by copyright.

A 2022 study published in the Iowa Law Review highlighted the Catan rights holders’ apparent decision not to pursue legal action against Colonist.io, contrasting it with an earlier incident in which an Android imitation called Island Settlers was withdrawn following a cease-and-desist notice from Catan’s lawyers in 2011.

Companies which have taken action against unauthorised digital adaptations include Disney, which prompted the closure of the unofficial Disney Lorcana simulator Pixelborn in 2024 over its use of the game’s protected card imagery. Pixelborn creator Pavel Kolev said more than 6.5 million games had been played on the platform before it was shut down.

Anthropic’s new intervention follows controversy over AI-generated video game clones, including cases where developers have withdrawn public demonstrations over concerns that their games could be copied before release.

The new restrictions have already affected attempts to recreate published tabletop games, including a Claude Code user who reported being refused help to build a private online version of an unnamed, commercially released co-op board game.

The user wanted to create a password-protected version allowing friends to play remotely, including one unable to attend in-person sessions, and to introduce AI-controlled players to study the game’s strategy.

Claude refused despite the user specifying that the adaptation would not be publicly distributed, instead offering to help develop an original game using similar co-op and limited-information mechanics.

A separate complaint came from wargame publisher Raymond Weiss, whose Conflict Simulations business has released around 30 tabletop titles since 2017- including three nominees for the Charles S Roberts Awards, one of the longest-running awards honouring conflict-focused tabletop games.

Weiss says he has been using AI-assisted coding to create unlicensed digital versions of other publishers’ wargames for paying customers, calling them private, “personalized builds” for people he says already own the physical version of games which do not already have a digital adaptation. He charges between $400 and $800 per project, according to his website.

He reported on GitHub that Claude Code had begun refusing to continue work on adaptations it previously supported, although he acknowledged that he did not hold licences from the publishers whose games were being adapted.

The restrictions are, of course, limited to Anthropic’s own software. In a November 2 blog post, Weiss said he had already resumed the work interrupted by Claude’s refusals using rival AI coding tools OpenAI Codex and Kimi.